Ebon Praetor
Creature — Avatar Praetor
First strike, trample
At the beginning of your upkeep, put a -2/-2 counter on this creature.
Sacrifice a creature: Remove a -2/-2 counter from this creature. If the sacrificed creature was a Thrull, put a +1/+0 counter on this creature. Activate only during your upkeep and only once each turn.
- CMC
- 6
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- B
- Rarity
- rare
- Set
- Fallen Empires
- Price
- $1.02
- EDHREC rank
- #27414
Ebon Praetor puts a 5/5 first striker with trample on the board for six mana — that's a threatening stat line — but the upkeep cost of sacrificing a creature or losing two counters means it eats your own board if you can't feed it. The ceiling is real; the maintenance is punishing enough that you need a dedicated sacrifice engine before this earns a slot.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Ebon Praetor is legal in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and Oathbreaker, and sees essentially no competitive play in any of them. In Commander it has a narrow home in aristocrats or sacrifice-matters builds where the upkeep cost becomes a feature rather than a bug — commanders that want creatures dying on a schedule can weaponize the self-sacrifice clause. Legacy and Vintage have no interest in a six-mana creature with conditional upkeep when those formats can close games faster than Ebon Praetor ever hits the table. Oathbreaker follows the same logic as Commander at a smaller scale: only sacrifice-focused signatures make the cost tolerable.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Price Context
Current price
$1.02 cheap tier
At $1.02, Ebon Praetor sits in the bulk-rare tier — cheap enough that picking one up for a themed build costs nothing meaningful. Demand is narrow and nostalgia-driven, so the price is unlikely to move without a reprint or a breakout Commander pairing that never seems to arrive.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.